About Dr Bergman

My full CV, or CVs formatted any other way, can be requested from me directly.

The following serve as brief introductions to talks.

100 word version:

Dr Bergman qualified in Cape Town, South Africa, and later worked as doctor at Manama Mission, Zimbabwe. Here he, with Midwife Agneta Jurisoo, developed and implemented Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) for premature infants right from birth, with dramatic improvement in survival of premature babies. He has continued researching this, and has contributed to this becoming the policy recommendation of the WHO.
308 word version:

Dr Bergman graduated at the University of Cape Town, and worked in South Africa, Ciskei and Sweden, before working seven years as Medical Superintendent and District Medical Officer at Manama Mission, Zimbabwe. Here he, together with Midwife Agneta Jurisoo, developed and implemented Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) for premature infants right from birth. This resulted in a five-fold improvement in survival of Very Low Birth Weight babies.  He introduced KMC to South Africa in 1995, and after 5 years, KMC became official policy for care of prematures in the hospitals of the Western Cape province. He has given keynote addresses on KMC at International Conferences in six continents, and published articles on a variety of subjects in medical journals.  He was for 6 years Senior Medical Superintendent of the Mowbray Maternity Hospital (7000 deliveries per year) and five Midwife Obstetric Units (11000 deliveries per year).

Since 2005 Dr Bergman has been promoting KMC globally, as a Consulting Public Health Physician. He has developed and published the underlying scientific rationale that explains the very unexpected findings of profoundly lowered mortality from immediate and continuous skin-to-skin contact to very low birth weight newborns, summarized as “nurturescience” with Zero Separation of mother and newborn. He contributed to initiating the Gates funded World Health Organization Immediate KMC Study, and was a Principal Investigator in the WHO Study group that conducted this RCT, published in May 2021. Two years later this is now the formal policy of the WHO.

Apart from his original degree, he holds a Diploma in Child Health, a Masters degree in Public Health, and a Doctoral degree in Clinical Pharmacology, on the effects of scorpion stings. He currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is also a Research Associate at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. He is married to Jill, and father to Rebecka, Simon and Emma, and has five grandchildren.